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"Big bookstores are the ones most affected by Amazon's dominance. Borders is long gone. Barnes and Noble isn't in the best health. And Waterstones in Britain has started selling Kindles. The reason? There is very little difference between big, impersonal chain stores selling books and a big, impersonal website selling books. Independent retailers, on the other hand, have a lot to offer that Amazon cannot: niche coffee, atmosphere, serendipitous discoverability of new titles and authors, recommendations from knowledgable staff, signings and events, to name a few."

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"Psychogeography is hot. Guy Debord, founding member of Situationist International and the man who coined the term in 1955, defined the phenomenon as 'the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals'. In fact, psychogeography is the art of strolling, or just about anything that gets pedestrians off their predictable paths and leads them to a new awareness of the urban landscape. Recently we've seen a remarkable psychogeographic revival driven by several artistic urban projects and smartphone applications."

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"An inspiring new website for digital culture and creative practices has been created by School of Art & Design academic Simon Perkins. The Folksonomy – www.folksonomy.co – is a knowledge commons and social bookmarking tool for digital culture and creative practice. The brainchild of Simon Perkins, as part of his research, the Folksonomy simplifies the process of clipping references and features photographs, videos and published documents. The Folksonomy is simultaneously a device for engaging with and a product of digital culture. It acts as a teaching tool for supporting the generation of ideas and digital culture creative practice. The research project is of a broader practice that extends from creative technology and design teaching and is focused on the nature of knowledge construction within digital culture environments. One of the unique aspects of the site is the way content is categorised, as it simultaneously belongs to multiple and sometimes contradictory categories, encouraging the viewer to make new discoveries. This sits in stark contrast to the more traditional logic conventionally employed by libraries and computer operating systems where books and files are organised according to a linear, centralised and hierarchical form. Simon says: 'The process of conceptualisation can be seen as an emergent process that involves the constant re–projection of prior understanding onto new and changing circumstances. The Folksonomy tool aims to support this type of tactical interaction through its use of linking and association.'"

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"Although a folksonomy is not a controlled vocabulary, and certainly does have limitations, there are important strengths that are important to understanding the appeal and utility of such systems.
Browsing vs. Finding

The first is serendipity. While the controlled vocabulary issues discussed above may hamper findability, browsing the system and its interlinked related tag sets is wonderful for finding things unexpectedly in a general area. In researching this paper, exploring the bookmarks tagged with 'folksonomy' on Delicious, there were many recent resources from a wide variety of authors and sites that I likely would never have been exposed to.

There is a fundamental difference in the activities of browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is similar to the difference between exploring a problem space to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for answers to specifically formulated questions. Information seeking behavior varies based on context. While one could evaluate a folksonomy in a system like Delicious or Flickr by using specific queries from users, and then evaluating which documents tagged with keywords they choose are relevant to the query, that would ignore the broader set of browsing activities that the system seems to be stronger in. Measuring the utility of that aspect would likely require qualitative research in the form of interviews or ethnographic study of users, and is an area of further study. It would also require comparisons not to search based information retrieval systems, but to browsing activities using other categorization and classification schemes."
(Adam Mathes, December 2004)